21 Pentecost/Lectionary 28 Year C October 13, 2013
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Guengerich Hutson
2 Kings 5: 1-15c + Psalm 111 + 2 Timothy 2: 8-15 + Luke 17: 11-19
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
There was a woman at work when she received a phone call that her daughter was very sick with a fever. She left work and stopped by the pharmacy to get some medication for her daughter. She returned to her car to find that she had locked the keys inside the car. She didn’t know what to do and started to panic, so she called home and told the baby sitter what had happened and that she did not know what to do. The baby sitter told her to find a coat hanger and see if that would open the door. The woman looked around and found an old rusty coat hanger that had been thrown down on the ground, possibly by someone else who also had locked their keys in their car. Then she looked at the hanger and said, “I don’t know how to use this.” So she began to pray and asked God to send her some help. Within five minutes a motorcycle roared up and pulled into the parking space next to her car. A rough, dirty-looking biker got off and saw her situation. He asked if he could help her. The woman thought, “This is what you sent to help me, God?” She finally told him yes, as she needed to hurry and get home to her sick daughter. He walked over to the car, and in less than one minute the car was opened. She hugged the man and through her tears she said, “Thank you so much! You are such a nice man.” The man replied; “No, I’m not, Lady. I just got out of prison for car theft.” The woman hugged the man again and with sobbing tears cried out to God, “You even sent me a professional.”
The author and theologian Anne Lamott suggests that there are really just basically three kinds of prayers. Help. Thanks. & Wow. I think she might be onto something. We can try very hard to make prayer something difficult, something shrouded in mystery and hard to do unless we’ve had a lot of practice and teaching. But the truth is, prayer is our cry to our Creator, our calling out to God.
Help. Thanks. Wow.
I can even make this work liturgically. In our worship, as we begin our worship, we pray Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. That’s what Kyrie Eleison means…Lord, have mercy. Christe eleison, similarly, means Christ have mercy. And so, when we gather, we pray for Christ’s presence among us and that Jesus would have mercy.
In the south, where I grew up, upon hearing news that is difficult or hard to fathom, an appropriate response is “Have Mercy.” Sometimes, it was “Lord, have mercy.” A beloved lady who cared for me as a child used to say “Lordeeee, mercy”. No matter how we put it, whether we sing it together or chant it in an ancient church or whether we say it as we shake our heads, it is a prayer for Help. Have mercy. Help.
Anne Lamott says that when get to that place in our day or our lives when we pray HELP, this is where restoration begins, because “when you’re still in the state of trying to fix the unfixable, everything bad is engaged: the chatter of your mind, the tension of your physiology, all the trunks and wheel-ons you carry from the past. It’s exhausting, crazy-making. Help. Help us walk through this. Help us come through.”[1]
In the Gospel story today, Jesus enters a village in a remote area between Samaria and Galilee. He is approached by ten lepers whose cry, whose prayer to him, is “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Help. They do not cry out, Jesus heal us. They do not cry out, Jesus take away this skin disease that has kept us from our community and our families. They cry out for mercy. Help. Lord, have mercy. Kyrie eleison.
Anne Lamott says that the second prayer is Thanks. Thankyouthankyouthankyou. Thank you for the day and for a job and for our family and that the diagnosis wasn’t cancer. Thank you for a new baby and a son or daughter who has found their way back to you. Thank you for leaves that are red and orange. Thank you for pets that greet us as if it’s the first time they’ve seen us in months and we’ve brought them the equivalent of the canine lottery. Thank you.
Gratitude changes things. It changes us. It changes communities, and it is why it is present in our liturgy. We sing our thanks to God. When we gather at the table to come to the meal, and I sing The Lord be with you….do you know what that part of our liturgy is called? It’s on page 5 of the seasonal bulletin, near the bottom. The Great Thanksgiving. Thanks. Thank you for your son, Jesus, who is present here with us today in bread and wine, body and blood. Thank you for the person sitting next to me in the pew. Thank you that I could get out of bed and get dressed and get here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
In the Gospel story today one of the lepers turns back to Jesus and thanks him. One of the ten. We spend a lot of time talking about the other nine, but the truth is they did exactly what Jesus told them to do…go, show yourselves to the priest. This one, though, could not go until he had shown his gratitude, until he had offered his thanks and praise. And when he does, Jesus blessed him again.
Isn’t this true…that when we offer our thanks, when we show our gratitude, we are blessed again? When we take the time and the opportunity to say thank you…we somehow name again the blessing, the gift, the person or encounter or surprise or thing or miracle that has generated the gratitude within us.
And here’s the thing about gratitude. It spills over. Thanksgiving spreads love out into the world and into our hearts and into our lives. Thanksgiving is like the gas for our engines…..it’s what allows us to go out into the world and take our faith with us.
In our first reading this morning we heard the story of Naaman. Naaman was like the General Schwarzkopf or Colin Powell of his time. He was a mighty and powerful person, highly regarded by everyone. But like the ten lepers in our Gospel story, Naaman also has a skin disease that is wreaking so much havoc in his life that he will do almost anything to be healed. Hearing that Elisha, a man of God, might be able to help, Naaman goes with all of his wealth and possessions and signs of power. He takes silver and gold and his fanciest clothing….not the kind they sell at T.J. Maxx, but the full price, Madison Avenue clothing. He goes with horses and chariots and servants and with all of his power and might he pulls up to Elisha’s door and says Help. Help.
Elisha doesn’t even bother to come out. He sends a messenger and tells Naaman to go wash in the Jordan river seven times. That will do it. So Naaman becomes angry and leaves! Naaman wants a lot more razzle dazzle for his healing. He wants some waving of hands and calling on the name of the LORD. For heaven’s sake, Naaman says, if all it takes is washing in the river, there are rivers in Damascus, where he comes from, he could have just washed in them.
Oh, Naaman. I know you. We all know you. You are that person, who prayed Help and then decided that you’d just go ahead and take matters in your own hands. Even when God’s answer to your prayers was an unlikely one….as simple as washing 7 times in a river. Even when that answer to prayer came from an unlikely place, a man of God recommended to you by the young slave girl who serves your wife. You needed to handle it on your own. You missed God’s response to your prayer. You missed God reaching out and down to you when you were in the biggest mess you’d ever been in. You missed God’s presence at the end of the river Jordan, washing you clean.
Of course, eventually, after being persuaded by his servants to give the river washing thing a try, Naaman was made clean, his flesh was like that of a young boy, pure and spotless. And like the one leper who came to thank Jesus, Naaman and all of this company, the text says, came back to Elisha and said Wow. Wow. Or more precisely, according to the text, Naaman said “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.” Wow.
Wow. Wow is also the shortened version of the Psalm on this day. Hallelujah! I give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart! Thanks! Great are your works, O LORD….Wow! The works of your hands are faithfulness and justice, all your precepts are sure! Wow!
Sisters and brothers, every day, in fact our every moment, is filled with an opportunity for prayer. I must tell you that I don’t believe God cares very much whether we get a good parking spot, or whether our football team wins, or whether we have a date for the dance. But God does care for us….for the brokenness in our lives, for the fears that we dare not name. God cares for the joys too….for the things that make us burst forth with gratitude and thanksgiving. And God cares for those things that make us stand in wonder and awe….the changing seasons, the fruits of the Spirit, the kindness of a stranger. Help. Thanks. Wow. Whatever our prayers, however we utter them, we can be sure that they are received by the God in whose image we are created; that they are tended by the One who sent Jesus to die for us; and that when we find we cannot even utter any prayers, the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. Wow, indeed.
Thanks be to God. Amen.